


the tomorrow you wished for

by orphan_account



Category: Vocaloid
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, Redemption, Reincarnation, Story of Evil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-19
Updated: 2015-11-19
Packaged: 2018-05-02 11:21:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5246465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(“If we could be reborn in our next life, then please play with me again.”)</p><p>On a perfectly ordinary Monday morning, a perfectly ordinary girl named Rin Kagamine wakes up with tears on her cheeks, and a name she can’t remember on the tip of her tongue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the tomorrow you wished for

 

もしも生まれ変われるならば

その時はまた遊んでね

(“If we could be reborn in our next life, then please play with me again.”)

 

* * *

 

 

There are some nights when Rin dreams about a princess.

It’s always the same princess, every single time: a young girl with a haughty laugh and a painfully lonely heart, all dolled up in court finery, makeup and ball gowns and jewels.

Some nights, the dreams are sweet ones, and the princess plays with a faceless blond boy in a garden, dappled sunshine on her face and grass-stains on her knees. They laugh, and the boy catches her wrist in one warm hand; looks at her with affection as warm and gentle as the evening breeze.

Other nights, the dreams are more like nightmares than anything else. Rin is the princess and she is watching a blue-haired boy watch a pretty green-haired girl, chest tight and eyes prickling. She is the princess ordering her servant to commit a murder, stony-eyed even in the face of his despair. She is the princess curled up cold and alone in her cell, listening to the mocking conversation of the guards outside.

The worst one is the dream where Rin is the princess, and she is crying silently, bitterly, even as the crowd cheers for the execution of a selfless, stupidboy dressed in her clothing. He searches the crowd from the execution platform, and when he catches her gaze, he _smiles._

The guillotine’s blade falls.

 _No_ , Rin thinks, but this body does not belong to her and she cannot scream; cannot shout her frustration to the heavens. This body belongs to the princess, and the princess knows better than to do any of that.

Instead, the princess buries her face in her hands and gasps out a helpless apology, shoulders shaking.

It helps nothing. The roar of the crowd reaches a crescendo, and the princess _runs_ —

On a perfectly ordinary Monday morning, a perfectly ordinary girl named Kagamine Rin wakes up with tears on her cheeks, and a name she can’t remember on the tip of her tongue.

The dream is already fading into the cotton-wool blurriness of all forgotten dreams, but she remembers the important parts. The princess, a boy in girl’s clothing, the guillotine—

She sits up and wipes at her damp cheeks with the back of her hand. The walls of her room are a comforting shade of beige, and she takes a deep, shuddering breath. Her mouth tastes like old paper, and she feels vaguely ill, like her stomach’s been all twisted up in knots.

Her cellphone buzzes, and she jumps, fumbling for it. It’s seven o’clock in the morning: she’d woken up before her alarm.

Sunlight is starting to stream in through the window. She can hear the chirping of birds outside. A pale blue butterfly has gotten into her room, somehow, and flaps lazily in slow circles around the ceiling light.

She takes a second to shake away the last, clinging tendrils of the dream, and then she climbs out of bed and heads to the bathroom to take a shower.

Her name is Kagamine Rin, and this is just an ordinary Monday morning.

(Or so she thinks, anyway. In reality, this Monday will be the day that everything changes, for her, and afterwards nothing will ever be the same.)

 

* * *

 

 

The morning breeze is cold and crisp on the nape of her neck when she leaves the house.

Autumn is in full flush, and the straggly trees on the sides of the road are painted a vivid red and gold. It’s early, still, and the streets sigh with a quiet interrupted only by the occasional rumbling of cars far away on the main road.

She walks, and she looks to the sky, and she breathes.

In the light of the morning, forgetting dreams is not such a difficult task.

She is not a princess. There is no blond boy who she has failed, no menacing guillotine and no hateful crowd. She is an ordinary high school student walking to school under the power lines and the blue sky, and she is living her ordinary life.

By the time the school gates come into view, the dream is all but forgotten.

 _I am Kagamine Rin,_ she tells herself, and by now it no longer feels like lying.

Still, unease sits in the pit of her stomach like a heavy stone, a constant reminder that something is off. The air tastes of ozone, sharp and sweet.

Ozone is the taste of the calm before the storm, she thinks distantly. There is a thunderstorm on its way.

She goes through the gates and into the school, takes off her shoes at the shoe lockers and switches them for her indoor ones.

“Hi, Rin,” says a voice at her back.

Rin looks up, halfway through shelving her outdoor shoes. They dangle from her hand by the laces, swaying slowly in the air like some bizarre pendulum.

“Good morning, Miku,” she says.

Miku giggles and reaches over to ruffle Rin’s hair. She slips in front of Rin to lean against the lockers in one easy movement.

“How’s my favorite classmate doing today?” she sings, chirpy even though it’s eight o’clock on Monday morning and they have an essay on _Genji Monogatari_ due fourth period.

Rin smiles, a little weakly. “I’m alright,” she says, not quite insincere. “Slept badly, though.”

“Oh,” says Miku, and her face falls. “Do you need to go to the nurse? I’ll walk you there, if you want?”

Rin shakes her head, reaches out to take the other girl’s hand. Miku is a nice girl, and her hand is comfortingly solid in Rin’s. Her skin is warm to the touch.

“No, it’s fine. It was that essay,” she lies, and tries to make her smile seem a little more reassuring. “I procrastinated too much and ended up staying up late to finish it last night.”

“Oh,” Miku says again, and thinks about that for a second. Then she goes white. “Wait, the _Genji Monogatari_ essay? Was that due today?”

Rin blinks, and then she laughs, startled. “Wait, you forgot?”

“Don’t _laugh_ ,” Miku wails. “I was busy, okay? What am I going to _do?_ ”

More people are filing in through the doors, now— Kaito and Meiko come in together, grinning conspiratorially at each other, and Miku perks up immediately, waves them over. She has been going out with Kaito for two months, now, and whenever he appears she goes all pink-cheeked and pleased.

Rin looks away. It would feel almost voyeuristic not to, and she has always felt a little uncomfortable in the face of Kaito and Miku’s relationship.

It’s not that she’s jealous, because— she just isn’t. She’s happy for Miku, and even though Kaito’s never really meant more to Rin than any other one of her classmates, he makes Miku so _happy_. But something about watching them together makes her stomach churn, faintly, with an emotion that feels almost like it belongs to someone else.

“Hey, uh,” she says, “I’m going to head to the classroom first. I want to ask Luka to look over my paper before class starts.”

“Yeah?” says Miku, drooping slightly at the mention of the dreaded essay. “Okay, see you there, then… do me a favor and help me think of an excuse for not handing it in?”

“Alright,” Rin says gratefully, and turns to leave. “See you later.”

 

* * *

 

 

Luka looks over her essay and corrects two mistakes in her kanji.

“You added an extra stroke to that one,” she’d said, sounding very bored, though that seemed to be a very common state of being for Luka. “And you forgot one here.”

Eventually they finish with the essay, and end up a list of excuses for Miku’s missing essay, helpfully written out by the ever-obliging Luka.

By the time their teacher shows up, the list has filled up the better part of a page with excuses ranging from the cliché (“My dog ate it, sir, I swear”) to the plausible (“I’m so sorry, but I came down with a really bad stomach bug this weekend and didn’t have time to finish, could I have an extension?”) and, well, the not-so-plausible (“A giant octopus crawled out of my toilet and stole it”).

 

* * *

 

But, of course, the unfortunate truth about forgetting strangely familiar dreams —that is, the truth about burying them under the weight of morning light and the humdrum troubles of the day-to-day in the hopes that they will never resurface— is very simple.

You can’t run away forever.

 

* * *

 

The teacher who has them for first period on Monday morning is the long suffering Takeuchi Eiichi: a slightly balding man with a nervous sweating problem, and possibly the kindest mathematics teacher that Rin has ever had.

He walks into the classroom looking incredibly hassled, five minutes late and balancing a stack of books and papers like a miniature Leaning Tower of Pisa in his arms. This is, in fact, very normal, for Monday mornings.

What is _not_ as normal is the boy who trails in behind him, bending down to pick up Takeuchi’s dropped pens and loose pieces of paper as he goes, although there seems at first to be nothing out of the ordinary about him, either.

He is blond, of average height for a sixteen-year-old boy, and wearing their school uniform, tie and blazer and all. He is not a member of their class— as a matter of fact, Rin has never met him before. The boy follows Takeuchi to the teacher’s desk awkwardly and lingers there, looking vaguely uncomfortable.

Miku breaks off from practicing excuses, and leans over to Rin’s desk to hiss, “Who’s he?”

Rin shrugs. She doesn’t know.

Takeuchi clears his throat apprehensively, runs a hand through his thinning hair. His face is already starting to get shiny.

“Alright, class,” he starts, voice quavering on the first syllable. “Before we start today, I’d like you meet your new classmate.”

Everyone perks up visibly.

“Why don’t you introduce yourself?” says Takeuichi, and the boy looks up.

He is handsome, in a strange kind of way, thinks Rin idly. His features are fine and very nicely arranged, but there’s something forgettable about him that keeps him just short of striking.

And then his eyes meet Rin’s and it feels like someone’s pulled her chair out from underneath her. It is a lightning strike, a thunderstorm in a bottle, an electric shock jolting through her spine— she knows those blue eyes. She _does_.

And he knows her too. It’s obvious, in the way he’s staring, shocked into silence.

The class murmurs, uncertain.

“Um,” begins Takeuichi awkwardly, and the boy jerks his gaze away.

He smiles sheepishly. “My apologies,” says the boy, with a hesitant smile. He is pointedly _not_ looking at Rin. “I got distracted. I’m Len. Len Kagamine. My parents just transferred here from Nagasaki. Nice to meet you.”

He bows, and Takeuichi finds him a seat. The commotion dies down.

 

* * *

 

After class, Rin catches the boy on his way out.

“Hey,” she says, and very carefully stares at a point exactly two inches above his eyebrows. “Hey, new kid.”

He smiles at her, awkwardly. He won’t look her in the eyes either: instead, he’s examining the tops of his shoes, very carefully.

“Hi,” he says.

There is a long, awkward pause.

“So, uh, I’m the class rep,” says Rin. It’s a boldfaced lie. The real class representative is the eccentric Gumi, who somehow manages to win the position every year, even despite the fact that she’s never done anything _but_ shirk her duties. “Want me to show you around?”

“Sure,” says Len, and his smile turns genuine.

 

* * *

 

Two weeks later, he kisses her behind the sports shed and then breaks down crying.

Rin holds him until the sobs fade away, strokes his hair with all the fondness of a memory from long, long ago. She can hear the sounds of their classmates playing soccer, distant and boisterous.

“I missed you,” she whispers. It feels true, though she’s not quite sure why. “I’m so happy I found you again.”

“I missed you too,” he whimpers, and kisses her again.

 

* * *

 

Afterwards, Rin and Len Kagamine are inseparable.

And neither of them ever dream of a guillotine again.

**Author's Note:**

> God, our fandom is so incredibly small, and I don't even care. You gotta do what you gotta do, right?
> 
> Please drop a comment or a kudo on your way out!


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